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Posts Tagged ‘fear’

Don’t Get Too Cozy with the King

Posted in Ordinary Time, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 25, 2011| 2 Comments »

I struggled with this one verse today. It’s going to be a slow trip to I Peter at this rate. Although I have come to peace with the idea of “fear” of God as awe and so forth, this verse is pulling me into new territory: downright fear of God who is not just my friend & Savior, but also sovereign.

I Peter 1:17
Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear.

I kept reading this verse over and over again trying to find a way out. I even checked some of the commentaries and a few blogs. It’s a challenge; it’s not warm and fuzzy with words like judgment and fear as pillars of the verse.

In the end, I found a wonderful blog post by Terry Hamblin (Mutations of Mortality) on this same verse. And I have to thank him for opening me up to accepting this verse at face value and allowing that to resonate in my soul. Amazingly enough, he quotes one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, from The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe,

“If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than me or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” asked Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

And that’s the point. We must remember that God is God and not our “chum.” God is loving and we, as believers, enjoy the safety of his mercy and grace, but God is also just and cannot be mocked or toyed with.

As much as I like to talk about God within and the Kingdom of heaven within and all of that, I must also remember that there is part of God without, that bigger God Being that envelopes all that is. Power is too small a word.

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Get Off the Anger Bus

Posted in Ordinary Time, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 19, 2011| 6 Comments »

Photo by Victoria Potter

Anger is not a disease, it’s a choice that eventually builds into a habit. I should know, I’m really good at it. I’m getting better at the outside version of anger but it’s a cover up for what’s happening inside.

James 1:19b-20
Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s [and woman’s] anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.

I think of anger as a bus because it’s always taking me somewhere, and rarely if ever, does it take me where I want to go or where I should be. It’s not always a bus; I also ride the anger subway, the anger jet and the anger canoe. Each one goes a different speed, but the results are the same.

And most of those trips leave a wake or trail of damage that takes much longer to repair than it does to destroy.

When I lived in New York, I took the subway a lot. At first, it was confusing and I’d have to watch the map and keep checking the walls for the name of the stop. But pretty soon, I got so accustomed to the subway that I knew where I was just by the look of the station.

Just because anger is familiar doesn’t make it a good thing. I know that intellectually.

I know that “anger management” talks about transforming feelings of anger into healthy expressions, like assertiveness or redirecting it into some kind of constructive behavior, or intentionally and rationally calming oneself down. I’m sure these are all good mechanisms and I should look into them.

But I would like to get better at catching the moment BEFORE I get on the bus. What is it that makes me want to jump. One of my previous pastors said it was “fear” and I can certainly agree with that in many cases: fear of loss, self-esteem, worth, value, control, etc. I think there are other moments too that are driven by something else than fear. Maybe it’s disappointment.

I have written and talked about the power of disappointment before, particularly in women. It’s wrapped up in expectations and hopes and dreams and when that disappointment comes, particularly repetitive disappointment, I think it mutates into anger: displaced, misplaced, and often illogical in appearance.

No easy solution, but certainly, the advice from James is sound: be slow to speak. Maybe, just maybe, if I could slow the process down, just a little, I could recognize my triggers.

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Holy Seeing

Posted in Ordinary Time, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 6, 2011| 2 Comments »

I have already written about seeing the invisible as well as the Invisible God. Hebrews 12 prescribes another piece of the process: Holiness.

Hebrews 12:14
Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.

I think it’s a little like being color blind. The closer I come to holiness, the more expansive my color wheel, my prism. When my eyes are clouded by 3-D things, problem mentality, and “what about me?” syndrome, I’m putting myself into a black and white world.

The movie Pleasantville, or even the Wizard of Oz, dramatically captured this difference. Colors look more vivid when they are juxtaposed against shades of gray. Don’t get me wrong, artistically, I love black and white, whether its movies or photographs, but I am talking about a different kind of non-color here. I’m referring to a non-holy world that is flat with unrelenting sameness.

To see God through the lens of holiness, we are promised the universe and that is hinted at through the glory. In American Sign Language, the gesture for holiness is a large arch over the head with the fingers fluttering.

But of course, the real challenge is entering the holy place. I’d say there is a type of nakedness this is a prerequisite for entry, not just the shedding of our outer layer of clothing, but also the skin of expectations and labels and the outer muscles of self-determination. We started walking away from the holy place the first time we said, “No, I want to do it myself.”

I cannot touch the holy because it’s not here in this world.

Holiness is wholeness (completeness, synchronization, transparency); it’s the paradox of loving those who should not be loved, living from inside out, choosing peace over violence, forgiving the unforgivable, mirroring Jesus, and echoing the Holy Spirit.

Wholeness is also brokenness. What is broken? the hard heart, the frozen spirit, the rigid memory, the fear of death.

Holy seeing is not for the faint-hearted. It takes courage and imagination to see what we do not recognize, to see and not identify, to see and embrace.

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Bitter Roots

Posted in Ordinary Time, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Grace is everything. If I could only grasp the full power of grace every day, nothing could cause lasting harm. Grace diffuses anger, despair, disappointments and resentments which all fuel bitterness. And bitterness hurts everyone.

Hebrews 12:15
Exercise foresight and be on the watch to look [after one another], to see that no one falls back from and fails to secure God’s grace (His unmerited favor and spiritual blessing), in order that no root of resentment (rancor, bitterness, or hatred) shoots forth and causes trouble and bitter torment, and the many become contaminated and defiled by it. [Amplified]

For some years I worked with the Elijah House ministries; I read many of the John and Paula Sandford books, I participated in the Basic School which taught the essentials of prayer for healing and how to recognize and address bitter root judgments. I met with my own counselor for several years.

So many early bitter roots are like persistent weeds in the garden that grow very deeply in the soil. They cannot be merely cut at ground level, they must be pulled out, otherwise, they will tend to grow back, sometimes larger, stronger, and even deeper than before.

Hurtful instances in our past act in the same way and can derail a life. My own life was on a treadmill of resentments about situations that were mostly outside my direct control: my father’s alcoholism and death when I was a child, my mother’s mental illness, our relative poverty, my brilliant brother, just to name a few. I had an internal tirade always playing in my head: why these parents, why this family, why this city, why this school, why this husband, and why this body. And the follow up to “why” became “if only” — if only I had more money, if only I had a different family, etc. The litany was endless. And each verse dug my roots in deeper and deeper.

When I began the healing process of allowing the Spirit to weed my garden heart, I thought I would explode into a million pieces. I had held on to those issues for so long that I didn’t know who I would be without them.

Although I was able to release many of my old hurts and habits, I recognize now that a life picks up other hurts along the way. Not all bitter roots come from childhood or even teen years, they can find yummy soil ten years ago or five or even yesterday. How deeply they are planted and how much I water my bitter roots will determine how easily they can be removed.

This is where grace comes in, through the love and power of the Holy Spirit, the work of the Messiah, and the intention of God to make all things well.

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Long Lasting Possessions

Posted in Ordinary Time, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 16, 2011| 1 Comment »

“Confiscation of property” goes back a long, long time in the guise of political necessity or religious cleansing. Could I let go of my stuff willingly in the face of injustice?


Hebrews 10:34
You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.

As a first generation American, stories abounded at the dinner table about the terrible losses our family and their friends suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and Communists during WWII.

When I met my half-sister for the first time in Latvia, 1997, she regaled me with stories about “our” father in his youth and then the terrible time of flight from oncoming forces, first from the West and then from the East. Karlis, in fear of conscription, fled his farmland and hoped his wife and child would be safe enough. Instead, the communists came through and took the land, giving the women only a few days to gather what they could carry and flee to the city of Riga. Once there, they were never united with my father again, who was caught by the Germans and forced into service as a guard.

They lost everything. This is just one family’s story, but of course, just a quick look at a newspaper shows entire villages fleeing for their lives, bundles piled upon their heads. They take what they can carry and no more.

What would I take? What is the most valuable? Would I lug out my laptop or my hard drive? Albums of pictures? My bible? Which clothes? How much can I really carry? Would I get the cat carriers, the dog leashes, the plant I’ve nurtured over 30 years of marriage?

No. Not really. These are the things of the “matrix.” No matter how tender I may feel toward them all, there is really just life itself and faith in the eternal Spirit.

One of my favorite Ann Tyler books is Ladder of Years: the main character walks away from her family and leaves everything, including them, during a beach vacation. Naturally, she causes her family some chaos and pain and concern, but for me, the tantalizing part is her slow discovery of self without the stuff that had come to rule her identity. She walked until she couldn’t walk anymore. She hitched a ride, she ended up in a boarding house room and there she stayed for a long time. She had nothing. And yet, she had everything she needed to live on.

Sometimes it’s a storm, a Tsunami, a tornado, that takes away our possessions. And there is no way to minimize the dreadful sense of loss. And yet, if life remains, then spirit remains, and anything is possible next.

Will that day of challenge come into my life still? Could be. Yes. Could be.

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The Devil’s Power

Posted in Eastertide, Time Up to Pentecost, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2011| 2 Comments »

In our 3-D world, the Devil (I know, I know, that label is “oh so old-fashioned”) has the power of death and as a result, the ability to cultivate a fear of death. If I succumb to that fear, I am enslaved by it. The Christ mission broke death-power and its sidekick, fear.

Hebrews 2:14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he [Christ] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

As long as we fear death, audacious faith is more difficult to grasp and hold and act upon.

Supposedly, the Christian norm has been to look forward to heaven, that eternal reward promised when we die. And yet, there are few who rejoice when a loved one perishes, few who can face their own end without navigating the stages of dying and grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and only, at the last, acceptance. Christian or no, most of us still fear the unknown of body death.

I think it has to do with a bit of tenuousness in the faith journey. If I put all my faith eggs in a basket and actually pray/expect a miracle, what if . . . what if . . . it doesn’t happen? If I put my faith on the line like that, won’t it break? If I am disappointed again and again, won’t my faith suffer? Better to be safe and secure and lukewarm. Not.

No surprise here . . . I don’t exercise my faith in the majors much: you know what I mean, things like raising the dead, healing the terminally ill, bringing sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and so forth. I fear the death of my faith. And so, the “Devil” wins again.

The Devil is not a man but an entity. We can no more understand what/who the Devil is than we can understand the transfigured Christ. To say the Devil is an “angel of light” [II Corinthians 11:14] on one hand and a fallen angel [Isaiah 14:12, Luke 10:18] on the other isn’t much help either.

We live in a world of balancing opposites like night and day, darkness and light, yin and yang etc. But the most potent set of opposites are love and fear. That’s right, the opposite of love is fear, not hate (which is merely a subset of fear). If I want to do battle against fear, that includes the fear of anything–including death, I must enfold, exude, swell, manifest, embrace, share, and trust the power of love. I’m thinking that miracles, birthed by the Holy Spirit, must be an outgrowth of this powerful and singular energy.

“[That you may really come] to know [practically, through experience for yourselves] the love of Christ, which far surpasses mere knowledge [without experience]; that you may be filled [through all your being] unto all the fullness of God [may have the richest measure of the divine Presence, and become a body wholly filled and flooded with God Himself]!” [Ephesians 3:19, Amplified]

“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” [I John 4:8]

I am no longer a slave to fear by the authority and work of the Christ. Isn’t it time I stopped acting like one?

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Who Are These People?

Posted in Lent, tagged , , , , , , on April 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

When Paul describes “these people” with a long list of attributes, I think we forget that the list needs to hold together in its totality, not pointing fingers at folks who may demonstrate one or two or even a few similarities. This full list is someone wholly trapped. And apparently, the worst version of this kind of person is one who “teaches” this way to others.

II Timothy 3:6a, 8
They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women [or men] . . . Just as Jannes and Jambres [traditionally believed to be Egyptian magicians] opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men [or women] of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected.

Let’s review the list of behaviors or attributes:

  • lovers of themselves
  • lovers of money
  • boastful
  • proud
  • abusive
  • disobedient to their parents
  • ungrateful
  • unholy
  • without love
  • unforgiving
  • slanderous
  • without self-control
  • brutal
  • not lovers of the good
  • treacherous
  • rash
  • conceited
  • lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God
  • having a form of godliness but denying its power

    • [II Tim 3:1-4]

This is a comprehensive list and not one to treat lightly. I don’t know anyone like this in my world. I just don’t . . . or do I? Of course, I know people who are rash sometimes or conceited, I even know people who act with no self-control and they can boast or be unforgiving, and certainly I know tons of young people who are disobedient to their parents. But none of my acquaintances fall into the morass of the list as a whole. Do they?

But we are warned here that there are people like this. And because there are, we need to be wary because this description is not necessarily of the terrorist or the killer or the drug lord. This array is about secret sins. This catalog describes someone whose internal life has been ground up and rearranged. This person is living a lie.

It’s one of the reasons why Paul specifically says, “They are the kind who worm their way into homes. . . ” [vs 5]. This person is a chameleon who adapts to the environment, cunning and crafty.

I’m not even sure, such a person is conscious of it, but instead, justifies all choices with a sense of self-righteousness and entitlement.

And yet, my greatest defense remains the same: right living, faith in God, love of others, and the making of peace.

Lord, give me wisdom and discernment. Protect me, my family, my community, my nation, my world.

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